Anyone
fortunate enough to be within a day’s ride of Dublin on Tuesday, 1 November,
should saddle up bright and early to catch the Irish Film Institute’s 40th
anniversary presentation of Sergio Leone’s A
Fistful of Dynamite, to be introduced by Leone biographer and Spaghetti
Western top-gun, Sir Christopher Frayling. Also participating in the event will
be director John Boorman, who assisted Leone in finding the locations used in
the film’s Irish flashback sequences, and Ireland’s top special-effects expert,
Gerry Johnston, who worked on the action scenes shot in Toner’s pub in Dublin’s
Baggot Street.

Frayling,
whose last appearance at the IFI (introducing Once Upon a Time in the West) was the highpoint of the 2000 season,
will use extracts from such films as John Ford’s The Informer (1935) and The
Quiet Man (1952) to examine Leone’s response to Ford’s romantic vision of
Ireland and Irish history, as well as casting an eye on the political Spaghetti
Westerns of film-makers such as Damiano Damiani, Sergio Sollima, and Giulio
Petroni. Also included will be rare footage of Leone directing the opening
sequence of A Fistful of Dynamite.